Project.

Deliverables.

UI & UX, Interaction design, icons.

I was responsible for user research and needs prioritisation through designing the user interface and user experience of the app.

Problem.

Enhance existing experience and propose a solution where users can live stream a playlist of their favourite songs directly from their phone to their followers or friends using their music files; or follow their favourite curators, artists, and friends to discover new music, hear forgotten gems, and listen to the songs they love with them.

Challenge.

Create an engaging, simple and cohesive digital experience for Bluejay Music within 5 days.

Although on a much smaller scale and just one team member, I used the 5-day sprint methodology and performed a number of tasks from “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp from Google Ventures.

Final product is available on Apple Store and Google Play:

Based on the exisiting research and insights I defined two key users of the app:

1. Host - a person who wants to share their music and gain insights from the followers.2. Listener - a person who wants to discover new music or listen to friend’s playlist and interact with it.

I mapped out both flows:

And prioritised their needs based on use cases following “I want to… so that I can…” structure

As a result, I’ve defined key criteria for the solution to be successful:

1. Host has to be able to host a session and interact with the followers.2. Listener has to be able to find and listen to a desired playlist.

This task helped me define areas that need the most attention and how the overall experience can be enhanced while still keeping it simple.

I conducted a quick global best practice review in order to explore different solutions and great interactions from all types of apps. Examples, as seen below, include travel apps like Airbnb with their swipe interaction, Soundcloud with their grouping idea, iHeartRadio and Apple Music’s favouriting feature, and others like Spotify with “in session” controls and bottom navigation.

What I really liked about Airbnb and Apple Music was the focus on providing exceptional browsing experience and making them very easy to discover as well as providing contextual call-to-action.Being a Spotify and Soundcloud user it was great to explore alternative solutions and leverage learnings from them.

Once I gathered and narrowed down all my inspirations, I spent some time hashing out different variations/ideas for the screens, after which I was able to decide which ones stuck out the most.

And that's how the final solution looks like:

As a last step before handing over the designs to developers I proposed a number of interactions in order to enhance overall experience.